| Present: |
P. Hazel,
D.P. Carter,
R.J. Dowling,
F.A.N. Finch,
C.J. Jardine,
K.M. Jeary,
R.J. Smith,
P. Stewart, R. Stratford, B.K. Omotani, C.E. Thompson, J.M. Wilkins |
Date of next meeting: 12th January 2005 at 11:15 in C304
On three of the last four weekends (and only at weekends!) one of the 16 Cyrus backend servers has hung. The most probable clause is RAID controller firmware: a new version has now been installed on half the systems. These hangs have been a useful test of the replication system on Hermes. Disk on Hermes is currently being consumed at the rate of 160 GBytes a week: the mail store is currently 44% full, compared to 19% in April. We are about to reach 100,000 Webmail logins a day.
Configuration changes have been made to PPSW in preparation for FANF's forgery protection scheme. "mx.cam.ac.uk" has been locked down to prevent spam relaying from virus infected machines on the CUDN. Sender address verification using SMTP callbacks remains an effective anti-spam and anti-virus technique, work is underway to reduce the steady trickle of false positives.
The interface on Jackdaw will be enhanced so that College and Departmental computer officers can see @cam aliases which point to their own mail server, and a select handful of people in the Computing Service (namely postmaster@cam.ac.uk and a member of the front helpdesk) can see all @cam redirections. cammail is due to be removed completely over the summer vacation 2005.
abuse@cam.ac.uk is now copied to cert@cam as well as postmaster@cam so that reports of copyright infringement are dealt with more swiftly in the absence of operator cover.
Engineering have confirmed that they plan to move all users from their own system to Hermes and a managed mail domain. The migration will be gradual and may mean that we need to keep providing 2hermes (and cammail support for this and only this) for some time to come.
Various colleges and departments saddled with unfortunate domain names from the NRS days have asked about the possibility of slightly longer and more obvious names for the purpose of Web and Email addresses only. A simple, single, alias to the existing name is trivial to implement in the mail world. Rewriting addresses to a canonical form is harder and something that we would not want to do given the potential confusion for both users and software (specifically mailing list software).
Warnings need to be added to the Hermes Webmail interface and the @cam redirection page. RJD has provided some sample text.
DPC 2004-11-26